"A pathetic creature of meat and bone..."

Doing my part…

While some may claim, I’m lazy by sitting at home… it’s not like I’m not doing anything ;)

I just happen to have some vary odd set of interest and hobbies.

Recently, I’ve been contributing to PC Gaming Wiki quite a lot. Making sure, people can run some older games without problems. Here are my major contributions:

Some pages required finding a workaround for installer. Many required finding information on how to make a game run in widescreen mode. Some required checking mods. Quite a lot of work, that I find satisfying.

On a side note, I have a slight crisis about being a brony and I’m having some problems with contact with my friends.

As for brony crisis - it’s mostly about what’s going on in this country, but it’s also about bronies themselves. It’s a clash of two different understandings of a word “tolerance” and concepts on how to behave.

Let’s be honest - bronies often do not behave in a way they should. Especially based on what they claim they believe in and their understanding of word “tolerance” rarely means tolerance for other people’s opinion… at least, that’s what I’ve experienced in the last few weeks, in which I’ve observed almost an incredible amount hatred in their response… or at least low standards. That is truly depressing. And not something I can applaud.

As for friends - well, they’ve changed. And this is where most of conflicts comes from… at least, that’s what they claim.

So here goes the petition…

https://www.change.org/petitions/eidos-montreal-square-enix-bring-back-stephen-russell-for-thief-4

Of course not created by me, but I’m hoping for the best. Even if it ends up being $10 DLC. Garrett is Garrett. Without Russell it just isn’t the same.

This way, I closed the year of making Crap Compilation.

Battlefield 4 still carrying the disease of Modern Military Shooters

You know… I’m sick of it. Seriously. Can’t we really have nice shooters?

I’m so sick and tired of Modern Military Shooter disease, that is infecting other sub genres. I love shooters! I freakin’ love shooters! And it hurts me so much to see BF and COD is what’s popular and what sells. It gives a message to developers and publishers that this is exactly what we want and that we want more games like this… and so - they come up with various ideas how to make franchises like Aliens, Warhammer or Dead Space seem more like COD or BF. This is wrong on so many levels.

I just finished playing Red Faction: Armageddon for the 2nd time and I’ve played its DLC. And? It surprised me. Almost all the time, I had one thought in my mind - “this isn’t great… but my god, this game actually knows it is a game - I’m going from point A to B, blowing stuff up, shooting and my gameplay experiences is never crippled by forced storytelling and/or scripting - I can explore levels all I want as long as all enemies are dead… I can fall to my death - this is beautiful!” So yes, I ended up playing Armageddon, wrote a recommendation and bang - turns out, a gameplay from Battlefield 4 was released. And…

I’m kind of depressed. I just see it and while I think to myself that the graphics are amazing…. there’s just barely any gameplay here. For about 17 minutes of footage, only about half of it was gameplay - maybe even less, if you count all the moments where a game forces player to walk slowly. First part was kind of decent, although not very entertaining - but the 2nd half - god, it was filled so tightly with scripted events.

I hoped - maybe with a new console generation, levels are going to open up and allow for some freedom. And bang goes Battlefield 4 withs its dirty shoes, fuckin’ everything up.

- B..b…b…but the graphics are so beautiful! Some may say.

I don’t give a fuck! I can have Quake 2 graphics - as long as the singleplayer is decent, and as long as the game doesn’t come with like 6 multiplayer maps only. As much as I hate what COD made - credits to Treyarch…

They realized there are problems with Modern Military Shooter formula and they did something about it. Fuckin’ congrats! 3 years too late… but at least they did something. If only the multiplayer of Blops 2 wasn’t so bad - maybe, I’d have support it. Battlefield 4? Same flawed level design as in Battlefield 3… screw… you.

Come on DICE… EA - you can do much better than that.

Oh well… there is still new Call of Duty to be announced - I’m expecting… a broken mess as well - can’t really expect more from Sledgehammer Games. Seeing Battlefield 4 today, however… so far, I can state that a future of next-gen shooters looks very bad. Terrible, in fact. I hope that some Far Cry comes to fix thing up…. maybe, Homefront 2 - Crytek… yes, there is hope in that. Please, Crytek? Please?

So that’s it for playing Battlefield 3…

I honestly wasn’t expecting that. I knew that BF3’s campaign is garbage - I read reviews and listened to multiple opinions about it. And it was pretty awful and I tried to enjoy it, just like I enjoyed other bad singleplayer campaigns - Homefront, Aliens: Colonial Marines. I tried to enjoy it, but I didn’t. Aside from admiring beautiful graphics with waaay to intense lightning effects - there just wasn’t anything that interesting in it. Boring storyline that we’ve already seen to many times, mixed with linear, scripted as hell level design, where the only thing that manages to shake things up was a tank mission. One of the worst QTEs, I’ve ever seen and just the right amount first person cutscenes, scripted events and scenes that were suppose to be shocking to made me call bullshit on its storytelling. I’ve honestly haven’t felt that bored of playing singleplayer campaign, since Duke Nukem Forever. Singleplayer was just waste of time.

The rest of ~10hrs long experience with BF3, I’ve spent playing multiplayer. I was expecting it to be highly frustrating, but entertaining and satisfying when everything goes right. Turned out to be neither of these things. OK, since I’m being honest (in the way - I’m writing exactly how I feel about it) - it was sometimes slightly frustrating… mostly because of its overblown lightning effects and some of the blur effects. But nowhere near at the level of what I’ve experienced playing BFBC2. Problem is - while I found BFBC2 to be satisfying and entertaining when everything went right (ergo - I’m killing a lot of enemies, destroying/defending objectives etc.), I have not found BF3 to be like it. I had few moments, when I killed like 5 or 6 people in the row defending objective and when I was successfully attacking point after point with my squad, but for some reason - none of it was satisfying. Not even a bit. And I don’t really get what’s wrong with it. When I’m having more fun from killing Aliens in Natural Selection 2, despite its stiff shooting mechanics and far from perfect controls, than here killing enemies left and right. Hell - I even have more fun giving informations when I’m spectating n L4D2, than here working in a squad.

I was expecting to be either completely frustrated or to enjoy the game a lot playing in the squad. And yet I leave the game, feeling disapointed, having played boring, super-generic singleplayer campaign and numb multiplayer.

Waste of money? Not really - at least, it has proven to be a nice benchmark tool.

Seems, like it’s back to Tribes Ascend for me. Possibly going to give DOTA2 another try.

A “special” game requires a special Crap Compilation.

System Shock 2 on GOG… and we have some controversy.

Hey! After years, we finally have System Shock 2 available on GOG. Sadly, only GOG - I’d much prefer it being on GreenManGaming, GamersGate or even Steam, where I can just press one button and leave it to download an install. But nope - GOG exclusive it is and there’s gonna be some clicking to install it. But hey - it’s back!

Except - what the fuck is Night Dive Studios?!

Night Dive Studios develops original and innovative games with a strong emphasis on fun and rewarding experiences. We also specialize in finding classic, abandoned and forgotten PC games and bringing them back into the hands of gamers.

Oh… ok. Except there is something wrong here. Appeared on facebook in January. Domain registered in November? OK - late, but OK.

So, what were you doing? (from RockPaperShotgun)

Kick: Night Dive Studios secured the license to distribute the game, and made the initial modifications to allow the game to run on most current operating systems.

Rambourg: There are some user-made mods out there which do phenomenal work on the game’s stability, but none of them were quite perfect, so we took the game to our expert techninjas to analyse and swat the remaining bugs. It was some work to get it done, but as this is a game that we’ve wanted to release for four-plus years, it was also definitely a labour of love.

Well, that’s cute, except…

the GOG package is the classic game, patched up with ss2tool 4.0, nothing less, nothing more. I might be just a fixer guy, but I know my files well. it looks like they ran the build at least once as the sound options are not set to their defaults, and the intro animation that only plays on the first run is already disabled. (voodoo47 from TTLG forum)

Thanks to user on Reddit, we also know - that nobody asked if they can use ss2tool for GOG release and that nobody gave them credit for that.

I know there’s probably going to be plenty of GOG fanboys defending them, but you know what? This case stinks. The only problem that was solved by GOG team is installer not being up to date. The rest?

All community fixes - literally months of work of people who loved the game and sacrificed their free time to make it work right…

and Night Dive Studios with GOG are taking all the credits for brining it back. NO… FUCK… YOU!!! Unless some kind of credit is given to people who actually are responsible for fixing the game (unlike Night Dive Studios), I’m not buying it on GOG! God damn liars! And neither should you.

And if there’s going to be some kind of kickstarter from Night Dive Studios poping up - I assure you, they’re going to take your money and run away with it!

Let’s check something…

It’s 1:30am (GMT+1) in here. Aliens Colonial Marines is already out and yet - there are no reviews to be found - not on metacritic or anywhere on Google. So - let’s make a bold assumption, to check something.

Considering that something like embargo agreement actually exists and that some publishers may say that “you can’t release your review early, unless you give us like 8.5/10 or higher” (it’s just an assumption and a myth in the industry), let’s consider this is what happened.

And that when reviews actually start popping up, they’re going to be lower than… let’s say 8.0/10 and many will feel the game is a disappointment.

I’m going to recheck it tomorrow when I get back home, to see if I was right. But - let’s just hope, I was wrong.

— EDIT —

OOops. Another failure at the level of Medal of Honor Warfighter. Damn. And I was so hoping for at least decent shooter.

Yeah… I think, I’m feeling fine doing this every month.

Garbage content on Steam Workshop… why I’m downvoting pony content.

About a week ago, Steam Workshop for Left 4 Dead 2 was launched, allowing gamers to download and install new campaigns, models and many others with a simple click of a button. Its launch was surprisingly smooth and it quickly filled with new items, once again proving that Valve knows what they are doing. Sadly, we can’t say the game about gamers. While the first 10 mods were fairly decent, the ones that soon fallowed, certainly were not.

Let me state something right here. I’ve been modding games since I was a child. I’ve made first changes to a game probably at the age of 8. I remember simple stuff like creating tracks to ReVolt or more complex like - changing amount of ammunition and amount of enemies in Operation Blockade. I’ve made 3, 4… maybe even more maps for Delta Force Black Hawk Down (at least 2 of them were featured on dedicated server of a clan that I used to be a member of). I’ve made some simple maps to Red Faction and finally stopped after years, either due to lack of games that actually supported map makers or lack of will to mod games. Finally, I ended up making and scrapping about 3 projects of L4D maps. Now I’m working on 4th one.

But you know what? Aside from these 2 maps for DFBHD - mods/maps/whatever that I made, were never accessible for anyone than my friends. And while back then I was tempted to publish them - I’m glad I didn’t. You know why?

Because aside from these 2 maps, most of stuff that I’ve made was garbage! And that’s what bothers me with Steam Workshop. There is no quality control! Everyone is uploading their stuff… and sometimes - they upload stuff that isn’t theirs. The closest thing that we have to quality control - voting system - is completely broken by the fanboy vs. hater wars.

So let me be completely honest - putting Applejack on a texture of AK-47 doesn’t make it awesome. Putting Rarity on a texture of Laser Sights’s box doesn’t make it awesome! It is lazy! It’s a garbage content and with the amount of stuff that guys like Turnoverman and spencer8833 are uploading, I’m pretty sure - it can be considered as spam and in some way - illegal.

Anyhow - the point is. I’m so sick of people once again completely abandoning any bases of rational thinking, just because they are fanboys or haters. Can’t we just downvote every non-fitting garbage content? Because we kind of should!

There is currently one piece of pony related quality content on Workshop - My Little Pony Survivors by Splinks. Eventually, I’d say - Parasprite Polka is OK. At least FGSFDS put it in a place, where it actually fits more or less. I wouldn’t say exactly the same about his other replacement mod - Cutie Mark Crusaders Show… but still - to some extend it fits there, as well - so at least these two guys put some kind of effort into what they do. Splinks spending plenty of time on modeling, texturing, rigging new character models and FGSFDS actually thinking what to replace, where and how.

Turnoverman and spencer8833? “Oh frying pen… let’s make it pink and put Twilight cutie mark on it!” No… fuck you! Both of you! You and your lazy, no effort mods!

So, can we please downvote each garbage content on a bases of it being plain lazy and bad and not downvote stuff, where actually effort was put it?

I personally hate anime - there was literally one anime that I watched that I found bearable. One! And the rest that I watched pissed me off. But I’m not going through workshop downvoting every mod that replaces survivor models with anime characters. That would be stupid… but if I see, something like a medkit with some anime character lazily sprayed over it - I will downvote it… just like I’m downvoting any other lazy, non-fitting creation on L4D2 workshop, as well as pony garbage.